tr27
Explorer
Storage Solutions Any good deals on NVMe external USB enclosures?
- Thread starter Black_Hawk
- Start date
@Party Monger can you link to that high-speed USB4/Thunderbolt enclosure you recently mentioned you got?
superczar
Keymaster
Don't buy right now if you can wait.
Being a fairly niche item earlier, few sellers would have imported limited stocks but now they would be mostly sold out due to recent demand surge.
As of last year, ASM2464PD was the chipset to get and I had picked one for about 6.6K
They all seems to be 10K or so now
Yep was looking at https://amzn.in/d/c68hzkl which is 10k - I can wait.
It needs to work as a ventoy.net boot drive on the USB-C port(s) (the USB4/thunderbolt one) on my AMD AM5 X670E mobo (Asus) with an SSD like a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB which I have. Hopefully get the full 3 GBps transfer speeds.
This one https://amzn.in/d/55irqmV which is OOS now - how much did you get it for? 4-5k?
It needs to work as a ventoy.net boot drive on the USB-C port(s) (the USB4/thunderbolt one) on my AMD AM5 X670E mobo (Asus) with an SSD like a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB which I have. Hopefully get the full 3 GBps transfer speeds.
This one https://amzn.in/d/55irqmV which is OOS now - how much did you get it for? 4-5k?
superczar
Keymaster
Out of curiosity , why even bother with an external TB ssd on that mobo?Yep was looking at https://amzn.in/d/c68hzkl which is 10k - I can wait.
It needs to work as a ventoy.net boot drive on the USB-C port(s) (the USB4/thunderbolt one) on my AMD AM5mobo (Asus) with an SSD like a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB which I have. Hopefully get the full 3 GBps transfer speeds.
This one https://amzn.in/d/55irqmV which is OOS now - how much did you get it for? 4-5k?
Party Monger
Juggernaut
Out of curiosity , why even bother with an external TB ssd on that mobo?
Mainly to use with the ventoy.net tool (for superfast OS installs) - need to plug in and out between my desktop and laptop - both of which have USB4/thunderbolt - though not sure of what kind of compatibility to expect between the three.
I have a gen5 ssd in the mobo (about 11-12 GBps read/write) and currently use a fast sandisk usb pen drive (about 300 MBps read) and a typical linux install time dropped from 2-3 minutes on my old desktop (with a gen3 pcie nvme ssd) to something well under a minute on this new PC.
Now looking forward to see what happens with an even faster external boot drive LOL.
Alucard1729
Forerunner
I tried this with those 10gbps enclosures and it wasn't pleasant for me with random disconnects (which I believe can be rectified by turning off ASPM) and the heat. Now these near PCIe gen3 speed enclosures could hurt you without some external USB fans XD
I'd like to see this asm2464pd being used with asm1166 HBAs among other things...
superczar
Keymaster
I don't think using a TB external will help with that because there is a fair bit of decompression and other CPU constrained processing during an install
A highly unscientific (and anecdotal) example is that I installed Bazzite (Ublue OS) on a Legion Go with a normal cheap USB3 nvme enclosure (Ugreen) right after delivery
A month later, I swapped the internal SSD and this time had the installer on the Thunderbolt disk
I don't recall the install being any faster although I did not time it per se
I think where a TB drive really helps is
a) Sustained writes Ops - Almost every USB3 enclosure slows down to a crawl after the initial burst .. sometimes as low as 70/80 MB/s. Typical USB4s will also slow down after a long sustained operations but still remain close in the lower GB/s scale.. Anecdotally no different from an internal
b) Stability for scenarios where critical data is involved: Since the TB/USB4 enclosures link over the PCIe bus , they appear as native drives to the system and tend to be far more stable/no dropped connections etc
However For fast reads alone, even a 1500-2000/- USB3 enclosure will give you 1GB/s easily - and I don't think any OS installation will need anything faster than that.
As mentioned in the earlier comment, USB3 drives connect over the USB bus and are prone to disconnects or data corruption.
Due to this, I had always been apprehensive of external drives for anything important.
USB4/ TB links are PCIe and in over a year of sustained usage with a ASM2464PD/ Crucial P5+, I have not had a single instance of instability or disconnects.
I recently moved by entire photo library (About a TB , 25 years worth) to an external.. Granted I do have it syncing to the cloud but I'd still never have done that if I had the slightest hint of instability in the last 1 year
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I'm optimistic that it will, actually... Typical linux installs read a single large compressed file (squashfs) off the source disk (usb pen drive) and yes it gets decompressed and the writes to the target disk (OS disk in the mobo) may be not serial (random and small files) but like I mentioned I've already observed a speedup from 2-3 minutes install time to under 60 seconds (not counting the time you take to configure your options, enter info/details in the installer etc) just moving from old PC with gen3 ssd to new PC with gen5 and with the same pen drive.
So I'm pretty sure slapping a gen3 ssd into a usb4 enclosure should result in some more speedup - but how much exactly remains to be seen.
Have you considered that the version of OS might be more optimized for your newer hardware compared to older one?